A Contrastive Study of Lexical Cohesion Used In Sport Texts of Washington Times and Tehran Times Newspapers Written by English Native and Iranian Non-native Writers

Abstract

Establishing a unified text which possesses distinct types of lexical cohesion is one of the challenging aspects of using a foreign language. This issue even becomes critical when producing the language in written form is of concern. The present study intends to contrast the frequency of the use of lexical ties in Times and Tehran Times newspapers written by native and non- native writers. To do so, two sets of corpora were selected each consisting 40 newspapers: 20 written by native authors and 20 written by non-native authors. After collecting the data from the two sets of corpora, and density of lexical types, the frequency of lexical ties were estimated. Later on, to compare the use of lexical ties in the two sets of corpora, two-tailed-test was used. The results indicated that there was a statistically significant difference in the use of lexical ties in sport text of newspapers. Moreover, results revealed that in Times newspaper the density of lexical ties is more than Tehran Times newspaper. The research findings have several implications for language instructors, university students and Iranian authors.